sonora2sonoma

A collection of short essays on my recollections of growing up in the Sierra foothills in the 1950s.

By
Tim Konrad

Our vet back in the 1970s was Dr. Lewis Bergstrom. He was dedicated to his work, he loved animals and we trusted him. My first wife Jeannie and I had a lot of pets, so we weren’t strangers when we’d call on him. Our relationship with Dr. Bergstrom began in 1966, when we brought our beloved puppy, Salvador, to him for treatment. Salvador was a Doberman-Shepherd mix, but he looked more Doberman in appearance. 

At that time, Jeannie and I were living in a one-room bungalow we rented from  Geraldine McConnell for the staggering sum of $55 per month. It sat on North Stewart Street behind the Memorial Hall. During our relatively short time there, we acquired a puppy, naming him “Salvador” after a restaurateur in Mazatlan, Mexico I had met while vacationing there.

A busy street wasn’t a good place to raise a puppy and, one day, when he was around two months old, Salvador slipped out of the apartment and was run over by a car. Jeannie and I took him to Dr. Bergstrom, who found the accident had broken Salvador’s right knee joint. The Doc set the leg and encased it in a cast. I can still remember the overpowering smell of betadyne that emanated from our pal when we picked him up at the vet’s office afterward.

Everything went well, or so we thought, until we brought him back to have the cast removed. When the day finally arrived, Dr. Bergstrom took us aside upon our arrival. Since Salvador had still been growing during the healing process, the Doc explained, the leg’s immobility had permitted it to fuse at the knee joint. He presented us with two options: Have Salvador ‘put to sleep,’ or have his leg amputated.

We both cringed at the thought of amputation, but the Doc assured us that dogs can still get around well with one leg missing. We chose that option but, in actuality, there was only one choice to be made.

The operation was a success and Salvador grew up to be a wonderful dog and a great companion. He had a generous personality and. most importantly, he was gentle with our young son John. After a few months we found a more suitable home in a safer location, far removed from traffic—a two-bedroom house in the middle of an almond orchard at the end of a long driveway. Located out behind the County Hospital, it was close enough for convenience but far enough away to evince a rural feel.

Among our neighbors was an older couple—Mr. and Mrs. Larry Kraft. Mr. Kraft would hang their clothes to dry on a long clothesline in their back yard. One day, Salvador pulled a blanket down from the clothesline and brought it home to our house. We returned the blanket to Mr. Kraft the following day with our apologies. The next time he hung the blanket out to dry, Salvador pilfered it again, once more bringing it back to our house.

After we returned the blanket the third time, and Salvador again made off with it afterward, it became a sort of mutually recognized but unspoken ritual in which Mr. Kraft would hang the blanket up and Salvador would take it down, repeating the cycle over and over again.

One crisp morning just before Easter we looked down the driveway and spotted Salvador sprinting up toward our house clutching a large inflatable Easter Bunny in his mouth. Upon reaching the house, he took it straight to our son, John, so he could play with it. It took a bit of persuasion to convince John we needed to locate the toy’s rightful owners so we could return it to them.

Even with one leg missing, I could not keep up with Salvador when we played ball together. He could outrun me straight-away and, when he’d zig unexpectedly, I would keep going straight despite trying to follow him,  sometimes falling down in the process.

One day, a large mastiff-looking beast showed up at our house. Jeannie and I were in the habit of letting our pets come and go in the house, so she allowed it to come inside. When she tried to get it to leave, however, it growled at her menacingly.

The same thing happened the following day, so she called Animal Control for advice. The County Animal Control officer back then was a man named Vernon Reitz. Mr. Reitz came to our house the next day while I was at work. He told Jeannie there was nothing he could do about the mastiff, since one of our dogs, Serafina, was in heat at the time.

While there, he took note of the number of dogs we owned—5—and said to Jeannie, “You don’t need that many dogs. Why don’t you let me take one or two of them?” Offended at the mere idea, Jeannie told him “no” and asked him to leave.

A day or two later, Salvador went missing. We searched everywhere for him, asked all the neighbors if anyone had seen him, and even placed an ad in the newspaper, but had no luck locating him. His disappearance brought us terrible sadness. Losing Salvador affected us all deeply because we regarded him as part of our family.

A couple of months went by and the sting of Salvador’s loss slowly began to fade, Then one day we read a story in the local newspaper recounting how an older gentleman named
Russell Grigsby, who lived in the Jupiter area way out behind Twain Harte, had also lost his dog under mysterious circumstances. Grigsby was a truly unique character who also happened to be a friend and confidant of the Union Democrat’s editor, Harvey McGee. The newspaper periodically published articles by Mr. Grigsby in the form of fascinating letters recounting his various exploits.

Grigsby, it was reported, had heard unsettling things about the animal control officer that had led him to  suspect Reitz might have had something to do with his dog’s disappearance. Mr. Grigsby had even gone so far as to ask Reitz if he had taken his dog. When Reitz denied having done so, Grigsby followed the officer’s truck as he drove to the Bay Area laboratory where he was known to transport animals left unclaimed at the pound.

It turned out Reitz had indeed purloined Grigsby’s pooch, as he found his dog still caged in the back of the man’s truck parked in front of the Berkeley facility where he had taken the dog to sell it for testing.

Upon learning of Grigsby’s discovery, it became clear to us what had happened to our dog. Since nothing we could have done at that point would have brought our beloved Salvador back to us, we didn’t report our suspicions to the authorities. It might have been better, in retrospect, if we had reported the incident, but we were heartsick at the time and just wanted to put an end to the affair and move on.

***

There were many times after that when we brought various pets to Dr. Bergstrom for treatment, ranging from routine vaccinations to mending our cat Tchitske’s broken leg, to after-hours trips to have porcupine quills removed from our mixed-Terrier, Malcom’s mouth. There was also the time a neighbor found our dog, Sweet, trapped beneath a large rock that had fallen on her while she’d been digging a hole in a midden pile uphill from our house out past  Phoenix Lake.  She’d been trapped long enough to become dehydrated, but the Doc returned her to good health in short order. Dr. Bergstrom took each assignment in stride.  That is, until the night I brought him an ailing rooster.

Known simply as “the rooster,” this bird had developed a tumor-like growth beside one of its ankles. As the lesion had grown larger, the bird had become listless. When I took him to our neighbor, Ernie, an old retired prize-fighter-turned-farmer, his advice was as brutal as his diagnosis: “Put it out of its misery!”

After taking one look at the ailing avian’s appendage, Ernie had exclaimed, “That’s Bunglefoot!” When pressed further to explain what Bunglefoot actually was, Ernie was as vague on his details as he’d been definitive in his prognosis.

Yet, when I took the bird to Dr Bergstrom, he was absent his usual reassuring self. He seemed thrown a bit by the exotic nature of my request, as if it was too far afield of his usual bailiwick. This surprised me because I knew he worked on farm animals. Apparently, cows and horses were okay to treat but chickens were not.

He’d never heard of Bunglefoot, the Doc had confided, but he mirrored Ernie’s advice nonetheless. I can’t remember for sure, but I seem to recall him having actually added, “Hell, if it was me, I’d take him home and cook him!” The humor was lost on me, however, since that also meant it had fallen to me to dispatch the poor thing, and I absolutely detested killing. I so disliked killing, in fact, it was the reason I’d given up hunting some years earlier.

I was disappointed. I had hoped that, if the Doc had determined nothing could be done to cure the rooster, he would have offered to euthanize it. If I’d asked him to do it, he probably would have, but it hadn’t occurred to me at the time to ask.

Back home, it was time to decide by what means the bird would be dispatched. That old standby, the hatchet, seemed too gruesome a way to contemplate, so I elected to send the rooster off instead with a bullet to its head. I briefly considered using my shotgun, but when I thought of the mess that would have created, I quickly ruled it out.

That left me with the 22, a small-caliber rifle best suited for plinking off varmints. Without going into the weeds on the relative merits of ammunition and its intended purposes, suffice it to say that a smaller-sized projectile requires greater aim to achieve accuracy than does its bigger, louder and messier cousin, the shotgun shell.

Evening had arrived and the light was waning.  In addition, the bird kept moving his head, so my first attempt missed its mark entirely. I got luckier with the second shot, hitting the bird squarely in his head while sending him off as painlessly and unceremoniously as possible.

I spent the rest of the evening sorting through the riot of conflicting feelings, thoughts about those feelings and feelings about those thoughts about those feelings that comes apiece with violent acts of the sort I had just perpetrated.

To be continued: